Ngatokimatawhaorua: The biography of a waka

By Jeff Evans

This is the biography of the mighty ceremonial war canoe Ngatokimatawhaorua that rests on the Treaty Grounds at Waitangi.The inspiration for its construction came from Te Puea Herangi. In the late 1930s the Waikato leader held a dream to build seven waka taua for the 1940 centennial commemorations at Waitangi. By 1937 two waka had been commissioned. Carved in Northland under the guidance of Pita Heperi (Te Tai Tokerau) and Piri Poutapu (Waikato), Ngatokimatawhaorua was one of them. But it was to be many decades before the true power of the waka to inspire a people was realised. In 1974 Ngatokimatawhaorua was refurbished by the late Sir Heke-nuku-mai-nga-iwi Hec' Busby for relaunching during Waitangi Day ceremonies. It was then that Te Puea' s dream turned into reality. By 1990, The Year of the Waka, 22 canoes and their 2000 crew gathered at Waitangi.Ngatokimatawhaorua and others became symbols of Maori unity and pride and an important part of the renaissance of the traditions of carving and voyaging around Aotearoa and beyond.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Massey University Press
• Release date: Aug 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781991016676

Book preview

Introduction

FOR MOST VISITORS a trip to the Treaty Grounds at Waitangi is an opportunity to learn something about Aotearoa New Zealand’s founding document, Te Tiriti o Waitangi (the Treaty of Waitangi), to look through the world-class museums, and to bask in the glorious views over Pēwhairangi Bay of Islands. They invariably wander through the Treaty House and beneath the shadow of the towering flagstaff on the lawn before it and, if they have the time, take in a cultural show in the ornately carved meeting house, the Whare Rūnanga. They might even stop to gaze up at the giant Norfolk pine planted by Agnes Busby, wife of the first British Resident, James Busby, in 1836.

But there is another must-see attraction — one that many don’t know about before seeing it in person. It is the giant war canoe Ngātokimatawhaorua. Built for the 1940 centennial commemoration of the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, in a project championed by Te Kirihaehae Te Puea Hērangi (Princess Te Puea), the 35.7-metre-long waka taua remains a powerful symbol of Māori identity, strength and pride.

Such was the pulling power of the waka that the Auckland Star noted:

All who were present at the Waitangi Centennial celebrations on February 6 [1940] agree that though the re-enactment of the signing of the treaty and the opening of the whare runanga were deeply impressive, the feature which made the occasion real from the historic sense and provided a tangible link between past and present was the presence of the mighty war canoe Nga-toki-matawhao-rua.

Many who went to Waitangi, both Maori and pakeha, had heard they would see there a Maori canoe, but until they arrived they did not realise the beauty, grace and even majesty of this craft nearly 120ft long, in the building of which the best of Polynesian culture found expression.¹

Now, two decades into the twenty-first century, there are no surviving kaihoe from that glorious summer morning on 6 February 1940 to tell us what it was like to paddle the waka taua under the gaze of thousands of spectators, but they must surely have relished the opportunity to follow their ancestors onto the waters of Pēwhairangi.

As compelling as Ngātokimatawhaorua’s participation was, its future after the event was anything but assured. Dismantled within days of the commemoration finishing, the waka was relocated to the upper Treaty Grounds, where it would sit, landlocked beside the Whare Rūnanga, for the next 34 years. And that may have been where it stayed, a curio for tourists to wonder at, were it not for the resolve of a group of kaumātua who argued successfully for it to be refurbished and relaunched for the 1974 visit of Queen Elizabeth II.

Today, waka taua are a potent window into the past. Durable, reliable and built to withstand the rough and unpredictable seas surrounding Aotearoa, these war canoes sit at the pinnacle of traditional Māori waka design. With a lineage stretching back to the Polynesian ancestors of today’s Māori, the design of these single-hulled waka was only possible because of what those explorers found when they arrived in Aotearoa — an abundance of very large, very tall trees, particularly kauri and tōtara.

Access to such massive trees gave the canoe builders in Aotearoa a considerable advantage over their counterparts in large parts of central and eastern Polynesia. Island-based canoe builders were restricted to building up their larger waka by securing hand-hewn planks together, edge on edge, resulting in a canoe that usually required a second hull, or an outrigger, to help stabilise it.

Helped by willing tourists, Ngātokimatawhaorua is pushed from its shelter, Te Korowai ō Maikuku, along railway tracks toward the shore. It’s a far cry from the early days, when the waka was rolled across logs in the traditional manner and then pulled back up to the canoe house with the help of a winch. JEFF EVANS

Canoe builders in Aotearoa, however, were able to source trees so big in circumference that when the logs were hollowed out, a thick, heavy ‘backbone’ could be left at the bottom of the hull. This extra weight lowered the waka’s centre of gravity and drastically reduced the degree of side-to-side roll that the craft might otherwise experience in anything but the calmest of seas. The benefit of that was twofold. Waka could be built without a second hull or outrigger, and, just as importantly, the inherent strength afforded by the backbone allowed craftsmen to build extremely long waka.

The place of Ngātokimatawhaorua as a cultural icon has been cemented over the years by the hundreds of thousands of visitors who have spent time with it at the Treaty Grounds or witnessed it being paddled on the water. But more so, its status is due to the mana of those who designed and built it, and those who have crewed it over the decades. Add to this list the names of the foreign princes and princesses, politicians and dignitaries who have been entranced while riding in the waka and you begin to understand its special place in the story of Aotearoa.

At 35.7 metres long, Ngātokimatawhaorua carries a crew of 88, and has room for another 40 passengers seated down the centre. Launched for the 1940 centennial of the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the cultural icon remains a drawcard for kaihoe and tourists alike. RAWHITIROA PHOTOGRAPHY

1

Puketi, a forest of giants

NGĀPUHI HEARTLAND, October 1937. Rānui Maupakanga, possibly the last master waka builder of his generation and by then in his seventies, enters Puketi Forest. Heir to the skills and knowledge required to build waka taua, he will prove to be a vital link to the tohunga tārai waka of years gone by. He will also be a key figure in the revival of the Māori war canoe.

Born in the small settlement of Hauturu near the eastern shores of the Kawhia Harbour, Maupakanga is solidly built, his face oval and his eyes deep set. A wide moustache covers his upper lip. He has a habit of wearing a short-sleeved bush shirt over his woollen jumper, and on sunny days a well-worn fedora and a pair of round-framed sunglasses complete the picture. He has made the long trip north into Ngāpuhi territory from Waikato, at the request of Te Puea Hērangi, to oversee the building of a massive waka taua.

At a planned 120 feet (35.7 metres) long and 6 feet (2 metres) wide, the waka will be the largest ever built, and will represent northern Māori during the 1940 centennial commemoration of the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Maupakanga is in the forest to locate a pair of kauri trees suitable for the task. Stands of the tree dot the forest, but his challenge is to find two large enough to meet Princess Te Puea’s requirements. Even with the help of knowledgeable local guides, the search takes him a full two weeks.

The week before I travelled to Puketi Forest, a low-pressure system had settled over much of the country, bringing with it the late onset of winter. After weeks of good weather, the days had suddenly turned wet and cold and dreary. The one saving grace was that the day I had chosen to explore the forest looked likely to be the driest day of the week, perhaps of the coming fortnight. Even so, the growing intensity of the showers dancing in my headlights began to make me nervous the further I drove. By daybreak I had passed Whangārei and the low-hanging clouds that hid Mount Hikurangi; ahead, the sky seemed to be darkening.

That I was driving north, alone and before daybreak, was thanks in large part to a couple of innocuous words I had seen handwritten on an old topographical map of Puketi Forest. Spelt out in black ink next to a minor forest trail were the words ‘Canoe Track’. I hadn’t quite believed it when I first saw the notation, but over the course of several years I had come to suspect that the logs used to build Ngātokimatawhaorua may have been taken from somewhere near the end of that track under the supervision of Te Puea’s experts.

Te Puea, a granddaughter of the second Māori king, Tāwhiao Te Wherowhero, was in her mid-fifties when she sent Maupakanga north. Renowned for being warm and generous and able to connect with people of all backgrounds, she had devoted much of her life to improving the welfare of her people.

In Te Puea: A life, historian Michael King contended she wanted ‘to raise and sustain Waikato morale; she sought to give people confidence in the present and future by drawing from the assurance of a Maori past’.¹ Able to call on learned kaumātua from within her iwi, she engaged experts in language, in music and in the oral traditions to help uplift her people, before extending the programme to support what King described as ‘more ambitious and more visible cultural projects’.² These included several carved meeting houses and plans for seven waka taua, each representing one of the canoes that had brought a major tribal group to Aotearoa.

Tasked with locating two suitable kauri for the construction of the massive waka, Rānui Maupakanga, seen here climbing over one of the felled trees, also oversaw the initial shaping of the three hull sections before they were extracted from Puketi State Forest. COURTESY OF THE MANLEY FAMILY

Michael King suggested that Te Puea’s desire to build a fleet of waka stemmed directly from watching the waka taua Taheretikitiki being paddled on the Waikato River as a child. ‘Nothing,’ he wrote, ‘had moved Te Puea more in her youth than the sight of a team of paddlers ferrying guests from Huntly to Waahi in Mahuta’s ornately decorated canoe Taheretikitiki, and then it going through its paces and manoeuvres afterwards to salute and entertain the visitors.’³

Te Puea wanted to share that sense of awe. She instinctively understood that anyone, Māori or Pākehā, who saw waka taua on the water were enthralled by them. And that is what she wanted to create: a symbol to make Māori feel proud, and for Pākehā to admire.

I too have been transfixed by the power and majesty of waka taua. In the mid-1990s I attended the annual Tūrangawaewae regatta at Ngāruawāhia for the first time. The spectacle of several fully crewed waka taua gliding along the river, white-tipped hoe flashing in perfect time, is one not easily forgotten. When I visited the Treaty Grounds at Waitangi a few years later, and had the opportunity to spend time with Ngātokimatawhaorua, I found myself entranced anew. Everything about the giant waka seemed to speak to me. Its graceful design, particularly evident while it was sitting in its open-sided canoe shed, was mesmerising, and its mystique was reinforced when I ran my fingers over the carved figures that adorn much of the canoe, and even more so when I took a close look at how it was put together.

The more I saw, the more it drew me in. How many other people, I wondered, had asked themselves what it must have been like to paddle such a waka into battle? Would the muscle-burning effort required to race the final 200 metres to shore, to where your enemy was waiting, have aided or hindered your fighting ability once you got there?

I was eager to read about the waka, to learn something of its construction and its history, but precious little was available. All I could find were a few clippings from old newspaper articles, mostly from the late 1930s and 1940, and some from the mid-1970s. Then, in early 1999, I met the canoe’s long-time kaitiaki, Heke-nuku-mai-ngā-iwi (Hec) Busby.

On the day we met, Busby was overseeing the launch of Ngātokimatawhaorua at Waitangi. He was in his late sixties, with thinning grey hair and the thick-set physique of a man who was slowing down. He wore a T-shirt and black shorts, a cap and a pair of old sandshoes that were fine for walking into the tide. A tattoo of his voyaging canoe, Te Aurere, was visible from under his left sleeve, and a carved whale tooth hung from his neck. He was there to ensure that the waka was moved with care. When he spoke, he did so with the authority of a man in charge.

Once the waka had been launched, I walked over and introduced myself. I asked him a couple of questions about Ngātokimatawhaorua, and then I asked whether he was interested in having his biography written. I don’t know what gave me the confidence to put the question to him, but I had already written about waka, Māori weapons and migration traditions, and it seemed that all those subjects converged in this one man. To my delight he said he was open to the idea, so we set a date for me to travel to his home at Aurere in the Far North to discuss the project further.

Over the course of several dozen interviews I gradually learnt that Busby was a remarkable man. Committed to the survival of his culture, he was an expert in many aspects of Māoritanga, including the use of the taiaha, and ancient karakia, and he’d become a sought-after authority on land matters within his rohe. He was also a giant within the contemporary waka world. After teaching himself to build waka in the late 1980s, he would ultimately oversee the construction of 23 canoes, including five waka taua and two double-hulled voyaging canoes — the type that still sail from island group to island group throughout the Pacific. Part-way through a traditional navigation apprenticeship when we first met, he would later be capped a master navigator by the legendary Satawalese navigator Mau Piailug.

On the occasions we discussed Ngātokimatawhaorua, Busby told me much about the canoe’s story post-1974, but his knowledge of the waka’s earliest days was limited to what he had learnt from one or two of his kaumātua, as well as the little he had been able to find in Māori Land Court records. Asked where the trees for the waka had been taken from, he readily admitted he didn’t know for sure. All he could tell me was that they were from Puketi Forest.

Busby’s reply reinforced what I thought I knew, but it didn’t get me any closer to pinpointing exactly where the kauri had once stood. It also left me with an uneasy realisation: if Busby didn’t know where the trees had been felled, it was likely no one knew. It seemed that my only choice was to pull together a small team and go looking for any evidence that might remain at the end of ‘Canoe Track’.

Because we were all converging on the forest from different towns and cities, we had agreed to rendezvous at the Department of Conservation (DOC) headquarters in Kerikeri before making our way inland to the forest. I was familiar with the building, having visited it half a dozen years earlier when I had first learnt of the existence of the topographical map we would be following. I’d heard about the map in a roundabout way. I was visiting Ewen Cameron, curator of botany at Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum, to find out about the habitat of the kauri tree. Specifically, I wanted to know why kauri are only found north of the 38th parallel south. Cameron told me he suspected it had something to do with a past mini ice age limiting the trees’ dispersal, and as we were finishing up, he suggested that if I wanted to learn more about kauri in the north, I should contact Stephen King of the Waipoua Forest Trust.

King, it turned out, was a fount of knowledge, and during our correspondence he put me in touch with John Beachman, a retired environmental management officer for the New Zealand Forest Service who had worked in Puketi Forest during the 1970s. When I got to speak to Beachman a few weeks later, I asked him if by any chance he knew where the logs for Ngātokimatawhaorua had been taken from. His reply stunned me — he said he knew almost to the exact spot. What’s more, he was pretty sure the location had been marked on an official map, a copy of which was held in the DOC office in Kerikeri.

Things were starting to get interesting. If the map still existed, this was an incredible stroke of luck. The few published eyewitness accounts from the 1930s offered no clues, and there were no living survivors from among the bushmen who had felled the great kauri. Even the few photos I had seen of the felling were unhelpful, as the surrounding forest was too closed in to divulge any landmarks.

I made an appointment to visit DOC’s Kerikeri office the following week, where I was met at reception by Adrian Walker, a friendly and helpful ranger with the rugged look of a man who spent plenty of time outdoors. After brief introductions he led me down a long corridor to his office, where he flicked on his dated computer and opened a folder containing several files. Double-clicking one of them, Walker turned the screen towards me and we both watched as a map slowly appeared. Scrolling to the bottom of it, he pointed out a small area coloured in yellow, just left of centre. Written in fine lettering within a finger-shaped sliver were the two unmistakable words ‘Canoe Track’.

So there is was, lit up in so many pixels — a possible key to locating a small but significant part of the story I was now chasing. With a copy of the map saved to a memory stick, I raced home to study it. The first thing to catch my eye was the incredible amount of detail. Everything imaginable seemed to have been included. The rivers and streams were predictably depicted in blue ink, while the fine brown contour lines, as distinctive as fingerprints, detailed the relief of the land, allowing the viewer to build a three-dimensional world consisting of valleys, hills and ridgelines.

Even the tree species were delineated. The stands of kauri I was interested in were divided into three groups: mature kauri were coloured yellow, kauri between 10 and 30 feet tall (3–9 metres) were red, and immature kauri were green. Elsewhere, light-brown patches depicted stands of podocarps, mostly rimu, kahikatea, miro, mataī and tōtara. Various shadings marked the position of nearby roads and outlined the boundaries of the forest. A legend to help unlock the rest of the map’s coded knowledge completed the picture.

Just a few minutes’ drive northeast of Kerikeri’s town centre, the DOC office looked much the same as when I had last been there. Hidden behind a wall of trees, the single-storey building housed a reception area and offices where the rangers did their paperwork. A fenced-in compound secured their work vehicles overnight.

This time I was greeted by Kipa Munro, DOC’s cultural adviser for Northland and chair of Te Rūnanga o Ngāti Rēhia. He had agreed to accompany me into Puketi Forest. Of Ngāti Rēhia, Ngāti Kuri and Ngāpuhi ancestry, Munro and his forebears had been guardians of the forest for generations, so it was more than appropriate that he form part of the expedition. It was also important to me that we had iwi approval to enter the forest.

Munro was in his early fifties and fiercely proud of his heritage. Aside from representing his people through the rūnanga, he taught mau rākau to